This Is A Mistake

I was going to write about how I relate to the character of Peter Campbell in Mad Men, but all I can think about is sadness. It's October 2020. We've been in this weird semi-lockdown state of the pandemic for 7 months. Hell, I'm blogging again -- a thing I and I'm pretty sure everyone else consciously decided to stop doing in 2013 when we all realized that tweeting could get us more attention with less effort. 

I quit blogging -- and writing all together -- because I had a complete crisis about the whole thing. I don't really want this to be like a diary entry, but again the sadness comes and overtakes my thesis, supporting paragraphs, and conclusions. Back then I would sit down with an idea and the words would just flow out. Now I'm writing a sentence and slipping back onto another tab to watch a few moments of The Vow, the HBO docuseries about the NXIVM cult. I'm pushing through something. It feels like a something, but if I look at it and consider it for a moment I realize that it's the sadness. 

How does someone know if they are good? Or right? Or if "good" or "right" are even useful concepts? I don't generally think that they are, but they're the concepts that fuel the internet, if not the whole of human history. I never really considered writing as an attempt to be right. It's a working out. It's throwing out a hunch and seeing if it flies or falls -- or dips and then lifts and then dips again. It's not always about saying what I believe. A good chunk of the time it's about sharing a passing thought I had as a thesis and asking no one in particular what they think. The most interesting thoughts we have are just feelings anyway, hard to describe and often existing just beyond the world of words. But we try anyway. My hope is that I can avoid turning the sadness into a desire to find "good" or "right." 

So creating a blog of writing that isn't in service to being good or right in 2020 feels like a huge mistake. It also feels like a mistake to throw out onto the internet for free something that I guess I could try to be good enough at to sell. But in some of those spaces where I find the sadness and I reflect on the things that have given me a sense of being alive, those years of blogging come immediately to mind. And in this moment when literally everything feels like death and everything is a competition for survival, writing about my sadness on the internet is as good a use of my time as any.